Hulking out on the tabs …
Hulk Hogan, who helped usher in American muscle culture in the 1980s and later KO’d Gawker in a mega lawsuit funded by Peter Thiel and graced the stage of the Republican National Convention, has died. He was 71. pic.twitter.com/vywWopevwW
— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) July 24, 2025
Ed: RIP to a true American icon. I may not have been a fan of “rasslin'”, but Hogan transcended the sport. He loved America and he didn’t bother to hide it.
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Hulk Hogan was the literal standard bearer for the America of my childhood, a time and place where you could be unironically told to say your prayers and take your vitamins so you’d grow up strong enough to whoop the ass of any Communist or Ayatollah who needed it.
God rest him. pic.twitter.com/RP0ZpqkmNm
— Ed. Condon (@canonlawyered) July 24, 2025
Ed: I’m a little older than Ed. Condon, but I know exactly what he means here. Hogan was a cultural force for most of his career, right up through the last election.
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Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche traveled to meet Maxwell in Tallahassee, Fla., where she is serving a 20-year sentence for her 2021 conviction on sex trafficking and other offenses for facilitating Epstein’s sexual abuse of underage teens.
Blanche earlier this week announced his plans to meet Maxwell. “For the first time, the Department of Justice is reaching out to Ghislaine Maxwell to ask: what do you know?” he wrote on X.
A Maxwell lawyer, David Oscar Markus, has confirmed her lawyers are in discussions with the government.
The substance of the meeting and the terms governing the discussion couldn’t immediately be learned. The department and Markus declined to comment.
Ed: I’ll bet they did. I wrote much more extensively about this earlier this morning, and I still don’t see why this benefits anyone but Maxwell. They will want a deal before she talks, and there’s no reason to think that the DoJ or the House Oversight Committee will get anything reliable or usable from her testimony.
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Rest in Peace Chuck Mangione. The master of the flugel horn.
“Feels So Good” was everywhere.
Raise your hand if this banger was played in your home growing up. 🎶🎶🎶🎶 pic.twitter.com/XZZImCGw3t
— Danny Deraney (@DannyDeraney) July 24, 2025
Ed: This one also hits close to the heart. I played the trumpet in my junior-high and high-school bands, about the same time as “Feels So Good.” Mangione was one of the musicians I envied for his talent and his work at that time, along with Maynard Ferguson, Miles Davis, and Herb Alpert (who’s still with us, thankfully).
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President Donald Trump denied on Thursday he would cut the “large scale” subsidies tech billionaire Elon Musk receives from the federal government despite an ongoing rift between the former allies.
“I want Elon, and all businesses within our Country, to THRIVE, in fact, THRIVE like never before,” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “The better they do, the better the USA does, and that’s good for all of us.”
Ed: Trump himself threatened this, but it was in the middle of a public fight that Musk started. It was obviously a war of intemperate words that both billionaires now regret. Besides, as Trump no doubt realizes, there aren’t many alternatives to Musk when it comes to SpaceX and his other businesses. And Musk no doubt also realizes that there are no alternatives at all to Trump for the next three-plus years.
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Just IN 🚨: ‘The View’ host Joy Behar announced the show is going on hiatus, with only one show left.
“we only have one more show after this, I’m allowed to say that right?”pic.twitter.com/bOCWDiS9Am
— Anthony (@AnthonyCabassa_) July 24, 2025
Ed: Would that ’twere true! It’s their usual summer hiatus. The View will return in September, for some reason or another. We’ll try to muddle through without the endless spring of material in the meantime.
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In a fascinating 2016 article in the Los Angeles Times, James Rosen discussed William F. Buckley’s frequent appearances on The Tonight Show. Rosen: “Today, the regular presence on the leading late night TV shows of someone like Buckley, an aristocratic intellectual given to speaking in whole paragraphs, even other languages — he began one ‘Tonight’ appearance with several sentences in Spanish — would seem, in a lineup dominated by actors and pop stars, glaringly out of place. Back then, however, Buckley fit right in and we were, as a nation, richer for it.”
Rosen celebrates the America that was “a Warholian conflation of High and Low that placed entertainers, athletes, politicians, novelists, intellectuals, psychics and oddballs on the same TV couch.”
With Colbert, it was all leftist all the time. A show in a time slot suited for peace at the end of a work day became a blaring and unfunny political rally.
Ed: It’s a great essay from my friend Mark Judge. Be sure to read it all. I think he nails the point, and the problem.
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NEW: South Park trolls NPR and 60 Minutes following Trump slashing funding to NPR and his lawsuit against CBS.
“The president of the United States canceled NPR… the funniest show ever where all the lesbians and Jews complain about stuff.”
“The president had it taken off the… pic.twitter.com/Z5En5R9ie9
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 24, 2025
Ed: Paramount just signed Trey Parker and Matt Stone to a $1.5 billion contract, the largest of its kind ever, while trying to gently show Colbert out the door. What’s the difference? ‘South Park’ skewers everyone pretty equally; the same episode had Trump in bed with Satan, as David noted earlier. I doubt Trump would enjoy that kind of skewering, but that’s the point — Paramount didn’t boot Colbert because he went after Trump. Colbert got dropped because that’s ALL he does … and his audience numbers show it.
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Ed: Hmmm. This certainly comes at an uncomfortable moment for Powell. And that’s not the only reason for discomfort …
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The Fed’s building project isn’t new, and cost overruns were the subject of a 2023 article in The Wall Street Journal. But the renovations have gained renewed attention after White House officials this month suggested that Powell either misled Congress or failed to properly manage design changes with a local oversight commission.
Powell defended his congressional testimony as accurate in a letter to White House budget director Russ Vought last week. The Fed has said it didn’t believe design changes to the project were substantial enough to warrant new submissions to the planning board.
Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has been Powell’s most outspoken critic and was the first administration official to call attention to the cost overruns. “This guy is supposed to be the money manager for the world’s biggest economy, and it doesn’t even look like he can run a construction site,” he said in a video tour outside the construction site that aired on Fox News.
Ed: To be fair, those really are two very different tasks. But it still goes to competency and honesty if Powell either misled Congress about the project, even if that was unintentional.
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Ed: Tonight, I’d like to give my late friend Jeff Dunetz the final Final Word. This was from two weeks ago Your memory will ever be a blessing, Jeff.
